Post Site Migration - thousands of indexed pages, 4 months after
-
Hi all,
Believe me. I think I've already tried and googled for every possible question that I have. This one is very frustrating – I have the following old domain – fancydiamonds dot net.
We built a new site – Leibish dot com and done everything by the book:
- Individual 301 redirects for all the pages.
- Change of address via the GWT.
- Trying to maintain and improve the old optimization and hierarchy.
4 months after the site migration – we still have to gain back more than 50% of our original organic traffic (17,000 vs. 35,500-50,000
The thing that strikes me the most that you can still find 2400 indexed pages on Google (they all have 301 redirects).
And more than this – if you'll search for the old domain name on Google – fancydiamonds dot net you'll find the old domain!
Something is not right here, but I have no explanation why these pages still exist.
Any help will be highly appreciated. Thanks!
-
Thanks Dana. Honestly, we have a lot of experience dealing with site migrations - I read dozens of posts and we've implemented our own step-by=step guidelines for successful site migration.
As you can see, sometimes even when you do everything by the book you can encounter some unexpected issues.
-
Yes I have. I could see the 301 redirects correctly and without any further issues.
-
Yes, it sounds like perhaps there is a technical issue here. I like Keri's suggestion below. Also, have you grepped your server logs to see if Googlebot is having issues?
It can taken Google a long long time to take down search results to old pages that either don't exist any more or that 301 to a new page. You may have to resort to using the removal tool. I realize that for 2,000 URLs doing these one at a time is inconvenient, but it may just be what you have to do.
I have some old notes on domain migration that I'll try to dig up, but unfortunately I don't think there's much there that's helpful after the fact. But I'll see what I can find.
-
the URL remover tool would be one of my last options, since I too would be afraid of any authority vanishing with the old link.
Google must have some reason to continue to index the pages and I wouldn't want them removed until I'm positive I gained back all the authority I could, from these old pages.
-
Are you certain the 301 redirects are active and working?
-
Can you add canonical tags to the 301'ed pages?
-
Make sure that none of the URLs in the 301 URL chain are disallowed by a robots.txt file. If they were in the redirect chain, Google would not be able to properly crawl the new page and properly index.
That last point may be what's preventing a portion of the old URLs from dropping, if they are being blocked in the robots.txt file.
-
-
What happens when you go into GWT and fetch fancydiamonds.net as googlebot? Is there some reason that perhaps googlebot isn't seeing the redirects correctly?
-
Hi David,
see my answer to RaymondPP.
Also, what do you mean by saying "you are linking out to your other site"?
Did you see anything?
-
There is a perfect correlation between the organic drop and the revenue – It has decreased dramatically. Of course I checked for Analytics issue but all the other traffic sources have stayed the same. We have big PPC campaigns and the traffic data is correct.
About management of expectations – usually we say that we expect 3-4 months of traffic droppings, but this had taken us a bit by surprise.
-
Thanks for the answer.
That's always a possibility - the problem is that these url's have not too few links (the old homepage is still indexed!).
If I'll use the url remover won't this result in losing all the link juice for those url's?
-
I agree with both of the previous suggestions and thought I would add a comment and a question too.
Seeing a decline of 50% or even more in traffic after a site migration is not uncommon. Hopefully your clients went into the migration with eyes open, knowing that they could see significantly lower traffic for anywhere from 6 weeks to a year, and maybe never fully recover. This sometimes happens. That's why the planning process is so important (and management of expectations).
That being said, when you installed Google Analytics on the new site, did anything change in your GA tracking code? Sometimes this happens and can lead to old analytics reports and new analytics reports not being an "apples to apples" comparison. It's just a thought. It could be that the traffic isn't actually 50% lower, but has changed much less than that.
Has revenue (or whatever your conversion goal is) dropped, increased or stayed the same?
-
I'm not understanding why your traffic is lower. If you have 301 redirects in place, even if your old pages show up and someone clicks the link, it will take them to the new site.
Another option you could pursue is a 410 (gone) for your old pages. This states to Google that the page has been removed and should no longer be indexed or linked.
But beware, you are linking out to your other site.
The 410 error is primarily intended to assist the task of web maintenance by notifying the client system that the resource is intentionally unavailable and that the Web server wants remote links to the URL to be removed. Such an event is common for URLs which are effectively dead i.e. were deliberately time-limited or simply orphaned. The Web server has complete discretion as to how long it provides the 410 error before switching to another error such as 404.
-
Hi skifr - Have you tried using the URL remover tool in GWT? And if you really want those pages out of the search engine, how about a noindex tag on the old domain?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
New Pages in my Shopify website is not indexing
Hi The Service area pages created on my Shopify website is not indexing on google for a long time, Tried indexing the pages manually and also submitted the sitemap but still the pages doesn't seem to get indexed.
Technical SEO | | Bhisshaun
Thanks in Advance.0 -
Any idea why pages are not being indexed?
Hi Everyone, One section on our website is not being indexed. The product pages are, but not some of the subcategories. These are very old pages, so thought it was strange. Here is an example one one: https://www.moregems.com/loose-cut-gemstones/prasiolite-loose-gemstones.html If you take a chunk of text, it is not found in Google. No issues in Bing/Yahoo, only Google. You think it takes a submission to Search Console? Jeff
Technical SEO | | vetofunk1 -
Website Migration - Very Technical Google "Index" Question
This is my understanding of how Google's search works, and I am unsure about one thing in specifc: Google continuously crawls websites and stores each page it finds (let's call it "page directory") Google's "page directory" is a cache so it isn't the "live" version of the page Google has separate storage called "the index" which contains all the keywords searched. These keywords in "the index" point to the pages in the "page directory" that contain the same keywords. When someone searches a keyword, that keyword is accessed in the "index" and returns all relevant pages in the "page directory" These returned pages are given ranks based on the algorithm The one part I'm unsure of is how Google's "index" connects to the "page directory". I'm thinking each page has a url in the "page directory", and the entries in the "index" contain these urls. Since Google's "page directory" is a cache, would the urls be the same as the live website? For example if webpage is found at wwww.website.com/page1, would the "page directory" store this page under that url in Google's cache? The reason I ask is I am starting to work with a client who has a newly developed website. The old website domain and files were located on a GoDaddy account. The new websites files have completely changed location and are now hosted on a separate GoDaddy account, but the domain has remained in the same account. The client has setup domain forwarding/masking to access the files on the separate account. From what I've researched domain masking and SEO don't get along very well. Not only can you not link to specific pages, but if my above assumption is true wouldn't Google have a hard time crawling and storing each page in the cache?
Technical SEO | | reidsteven750 -
Duplicate page content - index.html
Roger is reporting duplicate page content for my domain name and www.mydomain name/index.html. Example: www.just-insulation.com
Technical SEO | | Collie
www.just-insulation.com/index.html What am I doing wrongly, please?0 -
Why are pages still showing in SERPs, despite being NOINDEXed for months?
We have thousands of pages we're trying to have de-indexed in Google for months now. They've all got . But they simply will not go away in the SERPs. Here is just one example.... http://bitly.com/VutCFiIf you search this URL in Google, you will see that it is indexed, yet it's had for many months. This is just one example for thousands of pages, that will not get de-indexed. Am I missing something here? Does it have to do with using content="none" instead of content="noindex, follow"? Any help is very much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | MadeLoud0 -
Should I ask third pages to erase their links pointing at my site?
Good Morning Seomoz Fans, let me explain what is going on: A surfing site has included a link to my Site in their Footer. apparently, this could be good for my site, but as It has nothing to do with my site, I ask myself if I should tell them to erase it. Site A (Surfing Site) is pointing at Site B (Marketing Site) on their Footer. So Site B is receiving backlinks from every single page on Site A. But Site B has nothing to do with Site A: Different Markets. Should I ask them to erase the link on their footer as Surfing people will not find my Marketing Site interesting? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Tintanus0 -
Development site accidentally got indexed and now appears in SERPs. How to fix?
I work at a design firm, and we just redesigned a website for a client. When it came time for the coding, we initially built a development site to work out all the kinks before going live. Then we relaunched the actual site about a week ago. Here's the problem: Somehow, the developer who coded the site for us (a freelancer) allowed the development site to be indexed by Google. Now, when you enter the client's name into Google, the development site appears higher in the results pages than the real site! In fact, the real site isn't even in the top 50 search results. The client is understandably angry about this for multiple reasons. We quickly added a robots.txt file to the development site and a 301 redirect to the real site. However, that did seemed to have no effect on the problem. Any ideas on how to fix this mess? Thank you in advance!
Technical SEO | | matt-145670 -
Existing Pages in Google Index and Changing URLs
Hi!! I am launching a newly recoded site this week and had a another noobie question. The URL structure has changed slightly and I have installed a 301 redirect to take care of that. I am wondering how Google will handle my "old" pages? Will they just fall out of the index? Or does the 301 redirect tell Google to rewrite the URLs in the index? I am just concerned I may see an "old" page and a "new" page with the same content in the index. Just want to make sure I have covered all my bases. Thanks!! Lynn
Technical SEO | | hiphound0